Series / Space Odyssey Voyage To The Planets

Edit Locked

The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but mankind cannot stay in the cradle forever.— Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

Space Odyssey: Voyage To The Planets (released as Voyage To The Planets And Beyond in the United States) is a British two-part science fiction miniseries telling the story of a manned voyage through the solar system, presented in the style of a documentary. It was made for The BBC by Impossible Pictures, written and directed by Joe Ahearne and produced by Christopher Riley, and first broadcast in November 2004.

Five astronauts pilot the spacecraft Pegasus on a tour of the solar system. Their mission takes them to Venus, Mars, through a close fly-by of the Sun, Jupiter and its moons Io and Europa, Saturn and its rings and moon Titan, Pluto, and a fictional comet. Manned landings are made on Venus, Mars, Io, Pluto and the comet, while robot probes are dropped on Europa and Titan.

The crew encounter many hardships and disappointments along the way. The Venus landing almost ends in disaster when the lander Orpheus encounters launch delays, a Titan probe that fails after deployment and the loss of samples from Jupiter's moon Io all test the crew's resolve. The most devastating blow comes when the ship's medical officer dies of solar radiation-induced cancer after Pegasus enters Saturn orbit, forcing the crew to decide whether to continue the mission to Pluto, or abort and return to Earth. In the original British release, the crew decides to press on to Pluto, while the version broadcast in the United States on Science Channel was trimmed for length, with the crew deciding to turn back at this stage rather than continue.

The series adopts a documentary style, and claims to be based on "science fact rather than fiction". It certainly makes a serious attempt to depict the solar-system, voyage, space-craft and planets in a fairly realistic manner based on current scientific knowledge, but it remains a work of fiction, albeit one at the very hard end of Mohs Scale of Sci-Fi Hardness.

The toroidal aerospike rockets that allow the landers Orpheus and Ares to descend to and take off from Venus and Mars respectively - aerospike engines have undergone testing and a linear aerospike was even proposed for the Space Shuttle, but none have been flown into space,.

The force-field-like magnetic radiation shielding - purely theoretical; although is they have access to magnetically-contained fusion, it's not much of a stretch.

Ares is supposed to use a large paraglider chute for a controlled descent - while NASA toyed around with the design, it was never operationally used.

A Venus-grade space suit has to combine resistance to extreme pressure, extreme temperature, and possibly acid rain. Currently, no such suit is anywhere near reality.

British Brevity : It's only a two part miniseries, and the two episodes combined clock in at just under 2 hours.

British Telly: It was made by the BBC. Having two out of five crew-members British rather strains credibility. It might have been better to include a Chinese, Japanese or Indian astronaut (since those countries, unlike Britain, actually have national space programs), or at least an astronaut from another ESA country.

Government Marches On: the UK Space Agency was founded in 2010.

Camera Abuse: The cameras on Venus quickly fail under the hellish conditions; one is shown, half-melted and smoking, from the astronaut's POV. On Io, the high level of radiation (from Jupiter) shows up as random bright spots in the picture.

Captain's Log: Every member of the crew seems to be recording a video diary.

Centrifugal Gravity: Pegasus has two small habitation pods at the ends of long arm protruding from the main hull.

Chekhov's Gun: Earlier in the show a joke is made about how the drinking water is recycled and the crew are drinking each other's urine. This become a lot more important later one when one of the crew falls ill and potentially life-saving drugs can't be administered because the residue would end up in the drinking water.

Cool Starship: Pegasus is 1300 metres long and masses 400 tonnes. Her aeroshield is 400 metres in diameter. Her four main engines are powered by nuclear fusion using liquid hydrogen as propellant. Her internal volume is roughly that of ten jumbo-jets, and holds 60 tonnes of food, 80 tonnes of oxygen, five landing vehicles and several unmanned probes. Strictly speaking, she's an interplanetary spacecraft, not a starship, but she's cool all right.

Foreign Cussword: Gregoriev curses in Russian. Lessard also speaks Russian, and the two of them occasionally slag each other off in that language. Polite Russian dialogue is subtitled, but not the cursing.

Heroic Sacrifice: When Pearson, the medical officer, develops cancer due to radiation exposure, he refuses to undergo chemotherapy, because the toxic by-products in his urine would contaminate the ship's recycled water supply, endangering the rest of the crew. However, Fridge Logic does lead one to wonder why the ship is carrying drugs that cannot be used safely in the first place, and why the crew can't rig a low-pressure still from their lab equipment to recycle Pearson's urine separately. Deus Angst Machina, presumably.

Official Couple: It's very low-key, but there are pretty clear suggestions that Lessard and Gregoriev are an item. Everyone else is pretty much No Hugging, No Kissing, despite being sealed in a can for six years.

For a certain definition of "bigger", they are more correct, Jupiter would have to be much more massive to become a star, but it wouldn't have to be much more voluminous, if its mass were to increase, so would its gravity, preventing it from expanding much. As such, a Jupiter at 75x the mass would be much denser and not a lot more voluminous.

Aurora-like effects appear around Pegasus, and Lessard's Io landing spacesuit, when the magnetic anti-radiation shielding is operating. Sulman even names the aurora round the ship "Aurora Pegasalis". Auroras are caused by high-energy particles interacting with planetary atmospheres, and would not occur in the vacuum of space.

In Space, Everyone Can See Your Face: Eschews the usual stupid lights inside the helmet, but unfortunately also the metallic anti-radiation coating that renders real space-suit visors opaque from the outside.

Space Is Noisy: Mostly averted with the "external" soundtrack restricted to the musical score or radio chatter, but Pegasus' main engines are shown roaring several times, and there are some dubious rumbling sounds as the comet breaks up.

Subspace Ansible: The time-delay for a radio signal from Pegasus to Earth is always listed when the ship reaches a new planet, but the action is cut for dramatic effect, giving the impression of real-time monitoring and communication.

The Asteroid Thicket: Nothing like as bad as usual, but the risks involved in passing through the Asteroid Belt are still greatly exaggerated, and Pegasus barely escapes destruction in a near-collision.

Following on from Scifi Writers Have No Sense Of Scale above, it is questionable how far the sheer mass of propellant needed for a round-trip of the Solar System is accurately depicted. The crew is shown refuelling Pegasus from a pre-positioned, unmanned tanker in Mars orbit, and similar refuelling off-screen at other points is a plausible Hand Wave.

Community

Tropes HQ

TVTropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from thestaff@tvtropes.org. Privacy Policy